First opened Saturday, September 24, 2005
一日
ついたち
- tail-high (odaka): falls after mora 4
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
first day of the month
Tsuitachi began as tsuki tachi: 月 (“moon; month”) plus 立ち (“standing; starting, occurring”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
四月一日です。
It's April first.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “/tuki tati/ → /t͡suitat͡ɕi/”
- “Originally a compound of 月 (tsuki, “moon; month”) + 立ち (tachi, “standing; starting, occurring”, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb 立つ (tatsu, “to stand up; to start, to occur”)).”
Source: Wiktionary: 一日 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 一日 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not ついたち. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
いちにち
- “From Middle Chinese 一日 (ʔiɪt̚ ȵiɪt̚, literally “one + day”). Compare modern Hakka reading yit-ngit.”
- “The goon reading, so likely the initial borrowing.”
いちじつ
- “Ultimately from Middle Chinese 一日 (ʔiɪt̚ ȵiɪt̚, literally “one + day”). Compare modern Min Nan reading chi̍t-ji̍t.”
- “This reading uses the goon for the first character and the kan'on for the second character, suggesting a shift in reading after the initial borrowing.”
いっぴ
- “Compound of 一 (ichi, “one”, on'yomi, or Chinese-derived reading) + 日 (hi, “day”, kun'yomi, or native-Japanese reading).”
ひとひ
- “Compound of 一 (hito, “one”) + 日 (hi, “day”). Appears in The Tale of Genji of the early 1000s CE.”
ひとえ
- “/hitohi/ → /hitohe/ → /hitoe/”
- “Shift in pronunciation from hitohi above.”
What the labels mean
- Compound
- Two or more words or stems joined into one.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.